Tricky Question

So, are you more afraid of liv­ing or more afraid of dying? Your first response will prob­a­bly be a ref­er­ence to the sec­ond part of the ques­tion, when in fact the first half is prob­a­bly more true. Peo­ple are actu­ally more afraid of liv­ing than of dying. They will voice fears about death, but they will do all they can to live safely; they will con­form; they will hide in the pre­dictable; fit­ting in and going with the flow will be their keynote of life.

Fully liv­ing is a scary thing. It holds a lot of truly out­ra­geous poten­tial. Peo­ple hurry to cre­ate com­fort zones rather than explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties. We are con­tent to be con­tent. Jesus’ most scathing para­bles applied to this very thing. Risks are rewarded. Attempts to pro­tect or hoard life are dis­dained (para­bles of the tal­ents and the story of the man that tore down small barns to build big­ger barns — only for his own security…).

How often do you “lay it on the line” for an expe­ri­ence? Are you the Prodi­gal Son or the Older Brother? That para­ble actu­ally leans in favor of the Prodi­gal Son. Tak­ing risks, mess­ing up, and start­ing over will do more to mature the soul than hid­ing in the shadow of a par­ent (the pro­tec­tive par­ent can be a com­pany, a polit­i­cal iden­tity, a fam­ily name, etc.). If you have not really messed up, then you have not been involved in sig­nif­i­cant life risks. Life is designed to be a grand experiment.

Count me in with the Prodi­gal Son! I am a sucker for a novel expe­ri­ence. From this I have learned how to fail — which is the key to real suc­cess. Edi­son had nearly a thou­sand fail­ures before he cre­ated the work­able light bulb. Most of those attempts looked stu­pid in ret­ro­spect, but they were all nec­es­sary paving bricks on the road to the inventor’s dream.

In the final analy­sis, the ques­tion will not be: “Did you fail?” It will be: “Did you risk fully liv­ing?” Did you live like you meant it? Did you take the gift of life and do some­thing wor­thy with it? Our biggest obsta­cle to life is the fear of our poten­tial. Stop hid­ing in life and live it!